The Challenge of the Miscolored World
by Mikel Midnight
Summary: Based on the Flash and Atom team-up by Bob Haney which appeared in Brave & the Bold #53; it relates the Earth-6 equivalent of those events. Other primary reference is Lovecraft's The Color Out of Space, including several sections of prose.
The trees swayed ominously in the wind; and they swayed also when there was no wind. A dim though distinct luminosity seemed to inhere in all the vegetation, grass, leaves, and blossoms alike. Men and women were slightly luminous in the dark , crawled on all fours and screamed about things in the air which they could not describe, and in their ravings there was not a single specific noun, but only verbs and pronouns; or else they screamed in some terrible language that was not of earth save for sometimes lapsing into an inane titter or a whisper about "the moving colours down there." And in the nights of deeper darkness one could see wriggling at the rooftop heights a thousand tiny points of faint and unhallowed radiance, tipping each bough like the fire.

And through the city, Barry Allen ran. He had battled super-criminals like the Wasp and the Screaming Skull in his time, even the Speed Demon gang whose abilities rivalled his own, but the illness and malaise which plagued the city seemed beyond his ken. Whatever unnatural menace had imposed its presence on Central City stunned the brain and numbed him with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it threw open before his frenzied eyes, as he saw the city he loved become a grey, twisted, brittle monstrosity only resembling its former self.

Even his fiancée, Iris West, grew tired of his endless excuses for evading her in his civilian identity. "Oh, no! Why'd I ever fall for a police scientist?" she had moaned into the telephone. "If I were engaged to Quicksilver, he'd have time for me!" He suspected her anger would be none the less had she known her lover was in fact the speedster of renown, but it was a secret he held close to his heart for now.

* * *

Ray Palmer glanced at the message left for him at his small office at Ivy Town's newspaper _The Morning Telegraph_. He supplemented his professor's salary as a science correspondent, and at times it brought to his attention situations that he was uniquely capable of solving. This message was from a scientist whose name he recognised, Dr. Willis Stanton, and involved a mysterious colour from out of space. Unable to resist the summons, he locked the door to his office and changed to the specialised suit he wore on such occasions, and travelled at the speed of light to Central City in his more renown identity of The Ray.

"It all began," Stanton informed him, "with the meteorite that fell out of the sky and bedded itself in the ground beside the well at the Nahum Gardner place. It had shrunk with time, uniquely so for such things, although its heat lingered persistently, and Nahum declared it had glowed faintly in the night. I tried it with a geologist's hammer and found it was oddly soft. It was, in truth, so soft as to be almost plastic; and I gouged rather than chipped a specimen to take back to the college for testing. I took it in an old pail borrowed from Nahum's kitchen, for even the small piece refused to grow cool."

"I uncovered what seemed to be the side of a large coloured globule embedded in the substance. The colour, which resembled some of the bands in the meteor's strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that I called it colour at all. Its texture was glossy, and upon tapping it appeared to promise both brittleness and hollowness. I gave it a smart blow with a hammer, and it burst with a nervous little pop. Nothing was emitted, and all trace of the thing vanished with the puncturing. It left behind a hollow spherical space about three inches across, and all thought it probable that others would be discovered as the enclosing substance wasted away."

"When upon heating before the spectroscope it displayed shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum there was much breathless talk of new elements, bizarre optical properties, and other things which puzzled men of science are wont to say when faced by the unknown." Stanton drew forth the transcribed effects of the laboratory tests. "We need an intelligent, manoeuvrable radiant entity which can mimic its presence in the spectrum, with the hopes that we can determine what trace elements, if any, may have been left by the substance."

As the Ray formulated a response, he blinked, as in the time between his eyes' opening and closing, Quicksilver was there. The newcomer smiled at the other costumed man. "I'd not expected to see a fellow member of the Freedom Fighters of America here," he said. "What brings you to Central City?"

After the Ray and Stanton made their explication, Quicksilver looked thoughtful. "I'd traced molecular agitation which seemed related to the current malefic influence in Central City to Stanton's lab."

"I would be sceptical of his claims, although Dr. Stanton is considered above reproach in the scientific community for his work on optical frequencies," the Ray responded. "And if any connection could be found to your current ongoing struggles, perhaps united we can discover its true source."

"On your word, I shall set aside my current investigation to assist in your experiment, in the hopes that both Gordian knots can be untied at once," Quicksilver said.

After a tactical discussion, it was decided that Quicksilver would establish a vibration within the Ray which would match that of the orb, with the hopes that the latter would be determine the outer bounds of its radiance. Taking each other by the hand, the Ray transformed his body into living light, and soon transformed himself from his usual golden glow into the indescribable colour of the orb.

Quicksilver watched as his teammate changed, and then with a sudden pain which erupted on the back of his skull, he found himself seeing nothing but darkness.

* * *

The Ray's eyes adjusted naturally to the unfamiliar perspective, seeing a new world as if through an unfamiliar prism: wriggling at building height a thousand tiny points of faint and unhallowed radiance, tipping each roof like the fire of St. Elmo or the flames that come down on the apostles' heads at Pentecost. It was a monstrous constellation of unnatural light, like a glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish sarabands over an accursed marsh.

The atmosphere was split by a pair of gleaming baubles which seemed to tumble through the air in a manner as if they were rolling chaotically yet some interior energy seemed to suspend them ever-skyward. From the pursuing entity was generated new glow, something definite and distinct, which appeared to shoot out from a small black pit in its frontispiece like a softened ray from a searchlight save that it was directed indiscriminately. One of the glows struck the Ray, creating a not unpleasant sensation, and to his amazement it reflected back to the bauble which generated it, doing some sort of structural damage which caused it to tumble to the ground. The other bauble changed direction subsequently, landing near him. A section of one exterior corner wall melted away like wax, and in the opening appeared a distinctly feminine shaped humanoid who gestured to him invitingly.

He could not refrain from indulging his curiosity, figuring that a relationship of indebtedness existed between him and this alienly alluring young woman. He followed her into the craft, the interior of which seemed indecipherable by nature, save for the functionality of what appeared to be a pair of chairs, and a variegated surface before them which might have been a control panel. Seated in one of the chairs was a male humanoid, of the same race or species as the female, and from the texture of his face he appeared to be older.

"Be welcome, strange one," the male said. "I bear the appellation Larnus, and this is my daughter Arbellice. You have rescued us from the forces of Attila-5, for which you have our thanks. However, you have now made a powerful enemy, and if we can in any way repay you by transporting you to safety, we would be obligated to do so."

"I am known in my land as The Ray," he responded. "I have come here to investigate some deleterious influence your land seems to be having on my own."

Larnus' face showed a deep regret. "Our own planet, which circles around the star of Deneb, had become imperilled by a rogue star from elsewhere in the Cygnus system. Our ruler, Zarn, turned to the Science Council for a solution, and we managed to construct a Colorimetric-Oscillator, which saved our world by shifting it along the chromatic spectrum to a frequency unaffected by the star's influence."

"Unfortunately," Arbellice continued, "the process proved disorienting and destabilising to our citizenry, and in the ensuing panic the former leader of our military forces, Attila-5, conducted a successful coup. Not even that tyrant could hold power indefinitely, however, and he realised he could not maintain his reign indefinitely if he could not restore us to normal."

"Reversing the effect proved beyond our capabilities," Larnus said, "So Attila-5 reflected us towards Earth, in the hopes that it could so be repaired. He psychically dominated your 'Doctor Willistanton', and their restorative experiments had the consequences of negatively affecting your own land. If they continue, I fear our planet could displace your own."

* * *

Quicksilver's half-consciously recalled the sounds, the sense of dread expectancy, the darkness, the steepness of the narrow step, and the faint but unmistakable luminosity of all the laboratory equipment in sight. Finally, his hyper-accelerated mind ascended from its malaise and dark dreams. The Ray and Stanton were no more in the room. He realised he had abandoned his teammate to whatever unknowable existence lay within the world hidden from the Earthly spectrum, but his own absolute mastery of his body's vibrational rate meant that with the proper attunement, it need no longer be hidden from him. He recalled the frequency he and the Ray had explored earlier, and sought to match it, soon finding himself in an alien world. More gleaming baubles dropped from the sky, and from their undersides spun powerful tethers like webbing from the belly of some predatory arachnid, and soon he found himself bound.

The Ray spied the familiar blue and white uniform of his abandoned ally, and without hesitation took to the air in the man's defense. He soon found that by adjusting his own radiance, the harmful glows emitted from the crafts directed by Attila-5 were reflected back at their sources, leaving in their place nothing only bent and twisted half-fused remnants. "When I took on metamerical status to enter this world, it must've given me immunity to them," he realised, and soon was able to free Quicksilver from his binding, and brought him inside Larnus' craft.

The scientist greeted the newcomer, and explained the unfortunate circumstance to which their hubristic leader had brought them. "But I may have a solution," he said. He brought out a device which looked like a rocket pack made of mirrors. "A group of us had gone underground after Atilla-5 decided upon his expansionist philosophy, and developed a mechanism which might work to separate our world from your own … but we had no way to apply it. Our own vessels lack sufficient power. But with Quicksilver's speed, there may be a way."

The Ray examined the Deoscillator, contemplating the alien science which exceeded his ken, but to the best of his understanding it seemed to operate on the principles Larnus explained, and he gave his approval to the plan. Quicksilver donned the pack, his fellow Freedom Fighter transforming once more into light so as to match his incredible velocity, and the pair began the transition, altering their vibratory frequencies once again to return to their natural world.

"Go, Quicksilver, go!" the Ray shouted, as the speedster began to weave the circuit through town which Larnus claimed would be the most efficacious in activating the Deoscillator.

When they looked back toward the city they saw a fearsome sight, as it was shining with the hideous unknown blend of colour; trees, buildings, and even such grass and herbage as had not been wholly changed to lethal grey brittleness. The boughs were all straining skyward, tipped with tongues of foul flame, and lambent tricklings of the same monstrous fire were creeping about the ridgepoles of the houses, offices and other structures. It was a scene from a vision of Fuseli, and over all the rest reigned that riot of luminous amorphousness, that alien and undimensioned rainbow of cryptic poison - seething, feeling, lapping, reaching, scintillating, straining, and malignly bubbling in its cosmic and unrecognizable chromaticism.

Then as they reapproached Stanton's lab without warning the localised center of the alien coloration shot vertically up toward the sky like a rocket or meteor, leaving behind no trail and disappearing through a round and curiously regular hole in the clouds before any man could gasp or cry out. But their gaze was the next moment called swiftly to earth by the crackling in the streets. It was just that. Only a wooden ripping and crackling, and not an explosion. Yet the outcome was the same, for in one feverish kaleidoscopic instant there burst up from that doomed and accursed city a gleamingly eruptive cataclysm of unnatural sparks and substance; blurring the glance of the few who saw it, and sending forth to the zenith a bombarding cloudburst of such coloured and fantastic fragments as our universe must needs disown. Through quickly reclosing vapours they followed the great morbidity that had vanished, and in another second they had vanished too. Behind and below was only a darkness to which men dared not return, and all about was a mounting wind which seemed to sweep down in black, frore gusts from interstellar space. It shrieked and howled, and lashed the fields and distorted woods in a mad cosmic frenzy.

* * *

NOTES:

This story was based on the Flash and Atom team-up by Bob Haney which appeared in _Brave & the Bold_ #53; it relates the Earth-6 equivalent of those events (Ray Palmer's identification as The Ray led me to interpret their Earth as a DC/Quality blend rather than assuming their speedster is named 'The Barry'). Other primary reference is Lovecraft's _The Color Out of Space_ , including several sections of prose.


End file.
